POSC 4380: European Parliamentary Governments

Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Utilising a principal-agent framework, it investigates who within the parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists. Drawing on original interviews with EU experts from Labour, the PS, the SPD and the Party of European Socialists (PES), as well as an e-mail questionnaire, this book reveals that European policy has remained in the hands of the party leadership. The study also suggests that the party grassroots are interested in the EU, but that interest rarely translates into influence. As regards the selection of EU specialists, this book highlights that the parties' processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.

The European Union (EU) is a unique partnership in which member states have pooled sovereignty in certain policy areas and harmonized laws on a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. The EU is the latest stage in a process of European integration begun after World War II, initially by six Western European countries, to promote peace, security, and economic development. Today, the EU is composed of 28 member states, including most of the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This book provides a brief history of the EU and the major challenges currently confronting the EU as an institution. It also discusses the potential implications both for the EU itself and for U.S.-EU relations; examines the evolution of U.S.-EU counterterrorism cooperation; provides background on U.S. and EU data protection policies and the Safe Harbor Agreement; explores the implications for U.S. firms of Safe Harbors invalidation and the role of the proposed Judicial Redress Act in helping to ameliorate U.S.-EU tensions on data privacy and protection issues; and examines the Small Business Act for Europes various provisions and the major programs the European Commission has implemented to achieve the acts objectives.

In Europe, where the financial crisis was transformed into national debt crises in several countries, the current phase of the denial cycle marked by an official policy approach predicated on the assumption that normal restored through a mix of austerity, privatisation and less state involvement came through (anti-Keynes). The other view is this. Governmental investments and financial decision-making to regulate the effective demand in national economies is based on the basic principles introduced by John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), The solution of the temporary crisis of the democratic capitalism might be linked to Keynes by his successors the neo-Keynesians. However, the representative democracy has become weak and fragmented, and under control of international powerful multinationals. The citizens not any longer look upon their national government as their representatives but as representatives for interest of foreign states and international organisations. Poor public politics and policies are what come out of it. The first chapter examines the European Union's capitalism in crisis. The second chapter of this book presents the weakness of the EU lying in its own foundation principals; its developments and its incapacity for transforming from a successful internal peace system into a reliable world power. The third chapter analyses the case-law of the EU on measures to fight online piracy so as to shed light on whether the Court of Justice of the European Union struck a fair balance between intellectual property and human rights. Also, the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights is examined. The last chapter analyses Spains internal conflict over the breakaway intentions of a part of Catalonian society, going through different influential aspects such as history, ethnicity, language and culture; economy, the structure of the Spanish central government, the role of European Union and several other milestones in the main claims of the supporters of the independence for Catalonia.

This A-Z guide explains the key concepts and institutions linked to the European Union, along with brief biographies of the leading figures related to the foundation and development of the EU. This will allow students to link some of the theoretical concepts with the people who introduced them.The book is useful in discerning between the British and European Parliaments - students often confuse many of the concepts of the EU with those of the British Government, and the definitions in this Glossary will demonstrate that the bodies have differing roles to play in many aspects of their existence.